Klara du Plessis : part one

Winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Klara du Plessis’ debut collection Ekke was published to critical acclaim. Her newest book is Hell Light Flesh, shortlisted for the 2021 Raymond Souster Award and released from Palimpsest Press. Klara is a PhD English Literature candidate at Concordia University, a researcher for SpokenWeb, and currently expanding her curatorial practice to include experimental Deep Curation poetry reading events, an approach which places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each other and heightens the curator’s agency toward the poetic product. Klara writes in English, Afrikaans, and translingually, and lives in Montreal.

Photo credit: Dean Garlick

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry is language and thinking. Poetry is a way to be critical without discourse, to make more organic connections, to leave room for the flourish within the linear. This implies, in turn, that poetry allows for vast possibility, is a constant opening into the generative. All of this, while abstract, is crucial, on the individual level of expression, but even more so on the more collectively human level of speaking reality.